The Good Old Days. Jill, Feministe (2009-10-11). This article will make you lose your lunch. The idea is that sex with children is more taboo today than it was in Roman Polanski’s era — thanks to victims’ rights groups and a family values revival. The evidence? Well, Polanski himself, and this one Woody Allen movie. The article...(Linked Sunday 2009-10-11.)

Anarchist Elliot Madison wrongfully arrested, robbed. John, Blagnet.net (2009-10-06). In a continuation of law-enforcement agencies’ general disdain for and dismissal of our civil liberties, Elliot Madison, a self-described anarchist, was arrested for using Twitter and a police scanner to help G20 protesters coordinate their efforts and avoid police officers. The charges on which he was held don’t indicate any...(Linked Monday 2009-10-12.)

A Shocking Development. Daily Brickbats (2009-09-14). Two Gwinnett County police sergeants have resigned and Cpl. Gary Miles has been arrested after Miles allegedly used a Taser on a Waffle House waiter as a joke. The sergeants reportedly saw the incident and did not report it. The department is investigating claims a fourth officer pointed a Taser...(Linked Monday 2009-10-12.)

Comment on GT 2009-10-12

… but the streets belong to the people!Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-06-10): The People’s Stop Sign. In which people in an Ottawa neighborhood take nonviolent direct action to slow down the traffic flying down their neighborhood streets — by putting up their own stop signs at a key intersection. The city government, of course, is now busy with a Criminal Investigation of the public’s heinous contribution to public safety.

Abolitionism is the radical notion that other people are not your property.Darian Worden (2009-06-09): The New AbolitionistsThe point is that the principles of abolitionism, which held that regardless of popular justifications no human is worthy to be master and no human can be owned by another, when carried to their logical conclusion require this: that no human is worthy of authority over another, and that no person is owed allegiance simply because of political status. When reason disassembles the popular justifications of statism, as advances in political philosophy since the 1850’s have assisted in doing, the consistent abolitionist cannot oppose the voluntaryist principles of the Keene radicals.

Freed markets vs. deforesters.Keith Goetzman, Utne Reader Environment (2009-06-04): Do You Know Where Your Shoes Have Been?, on the leather industry and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Utne does a good job of pointing out (by quoting Grist’s Tom Philpott) that the problem is deeply rooted in multi-statist neoliberalism: because of the way in which the Brazilian government and the World Bank act together to subsidize the cattle barons and ‘roid up Brazilian cattle ranching, the report is really about the perils of using state policy to prop up global, corporate-dominated trade.

Well, Thank God. (Cont’d.)Thanks to the Lord Justice, we now know that Pringles are, in fact, officially potato chips, not mere savory snacks, in spite of the fact that only about 40% of a Pringles crisp is actually potato flour. Language Log takes this case to demonstrate the quasi-Wittgensteinian point that, fundamentalist legal philosophy to one side, there’s actually no such thing as a self-applying law. (Quoting Adam Cohen’s New York Times Op-Ed, Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more [linguists groan here], while judges like [Sonia] Sotermayor are activists. But there is no magic way to interpret terms like free speech or due process — or potato chip.) I think the main moral of the story has to do with the absurdity of a political system in which whether or not you can keep $160,000,000 of your own damn money rides on whether or not you can prove to a judge that your savory snack hasn’t got the requisite potatoness to count as a potato crisp for the purposes of law and justice.

Small riots will get small attention, no riots get no attention, make a big riot, and it will be handled immediately.Loretta Chao, Wall Street Journal (2009-05-30): In China, a New Breed of Dissidents. The story makes it seem as though the most remarkable thing about the emerging dissident movement is that they are safe enough for the State to tolerate them, rather than launching all out assaults as they did against the Tienanmen dissidents in 1989. Actually, I think that that misses the point entirely; and that the most interesting thing is that they have adopted such flexible and adaptive networking, both tactically and strategically, and that they now so often rise up from the very social classes that the Chinese Communist Party claims to speak for (not just easily-demonized students and intelligentsia, but ordinary farmers, factory workers, and retirees) — that the regime isn’t tolerating them; it just no longer knows what to do with them.

Counter-Cooking and Mutual Meals.Julia Levitt, Worldchanging: Bright Green (2009-06-03): Community Kitchens (Via Kevin Carson’s Shared Items.) If I may recommend, if you’re going to work on any kind of community cooking like this, particularly if you’re interested in it partly for reasons of resiliency and building community alternatives, you should do what you can to make sure that it is strongly connected with the local grey-market solidarity economy, through close cooperation with your local Food Not Bombs (as both a source and a destination for food) and other local alternatives to the state-subsidized corporate-consumer model for food distribution.

Communications

IMPACT! Strategies for Social Change Forum, Thursday, June 18, Sonoma County, California.Infoshop News (2009-06-08): Strategies for Social Change Forum on June 18th in Sonoma CountyIMPACT!, an independent and radical youth organization in Petaluma is turning one year old this month. Part 1 of the celebration is a forum, entitled Strategies for Social Change, where organizers from labor, immigrants’ rights, and anti-police brutality groups will be discussing their projects and strategies for achieving radical social change locally. This event will be bilingual and free. … As one part of the celebration of IMPACT!’s one-year anniversary, we are excited to announce a forum on Thursday, June 18th at 7pm at the Peace and Justice Center in Santa Rosa (467 Sebastopol Ave) … After hearing from all the different organizations, we hope to have an open dialogue about how we can build real people power in our communities and what methods, strategies, tactics, we can implement to achieve long-lasting and radical social change.

Gabriel:
I read a story about some street thugs attacking a good samaritan and getting a slap on the wrist:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3152515&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
Actually the …
[2009-06-11 3:51:28 pm]

Later, other posts to Jason’s facebook page revealed they were all arrested. After asking for details and hearing nothing, I called the Jones County Jail at 601-649-7502 and confirmed they have all been imprisoned.

Coalitions of the Willing

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